As Trump brags "every rally is full," cameraman pans over empty arena

Trump was addressing supporters at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina

By Marin Scotten

News Fellow

Published November 4, 2024 11:15AM (EST)

Attendees take their seats as they arrive for a campaign rally for former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at First Horizon Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina, on November 2, 2024. (CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA/AFP via Getty Images)
Attendees take their seats as they arrive for a campaign rally for former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at First Horizon Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina, on November 2, 2024. (CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA/AFP via Getty Images)

Former President Donald Trump got called out mid-boast on Saturday as he claimed his rallies are always full, right before a cameraman panned to a number of empty seats across the stadium.

“We have had the biggest rallies in the history of any country, and every rally is full. You do not have any seats that are empty. You did not have anything,” Trump told the crowd in Greensboro, North Carolina.

An NTD.com cameraman then zoomed in on sections of empty seats as people left the already sparsely populated stadium. The video quickly went viral and was reposted by the Harris-Walz X account: “Trump: ‘Every rally is full. You do not have any seats that are empty,'" the post reads. "Cameraperson: Hold my beer."

Crowd size has long been a fixation for Trump. He's repeatedly bragged about how big his rallies are compared to those of Vice President Kamala Harris and even falsely claimed that she used AI to generate images of a massive crowd at one of her campaign stops.

The two candidates have gone back and forth on whose rallies’ draw more people. Just last week the Harris campaign said the crowd of 75,000 who attended her speech at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, crushed the size of Trump’s Jan. 6 rally in the same spot nearly four years ago. 

A September analysis from The New York Times found Harris’ and Trump’s rallies drew similar crowd sizes, though experts told the newspaper that rally size is irrelevant to the outcome of an election.


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